According to Jason Wise, director of the highly anticipated documentary "Somm," the prestigious master sommelier examination is the hardest test ever created that might not be totally necessary.

"You look at Navy SEALs and heart surgeons and you see what they go through and understand why they do it," says Wise, who spent three years in France, Italy, Germany and Napa filming his documentary about the highest title in the field of wine. "If you're going to do this test, it's because you want to be able to say, 'I did it. I got to the top.' "

The film, which premieres Nov. 7 at the Napa Valley Film Festival, is not about wine but rather about ambition, he says. It follows four sommeliers, all friends, as they prepare to conquer an exam that has a less than 10 percent pass rate -- by contrast, the California bar exam pass rate is 60 percent -- and tends to take over one's life.

"Whether it's the master sommelier exam or getting into Harvard or becoming an astronaut, we are pretty fascinated by things that are really hard to do or attain," Wise says.

There are 197 master sommeliers in the world. More than half live in the United States, with 36 in Northern California, working in higher education or in the upper echelons of restaurant hospitality, where, as a result of passing the exam, they know literally everything about wine -- its history, where and how it is made, served, and the 10,000-plus grape varietals used to make it.

Advertisement

That's what the exam covers: everything about a substance that has been around for some 8,000 years. In the blind tasting portion of the exam, for instance, candidates must be able to identify what they are drinking in terms of grape variety or blend, region, subregion and vintage.

So it's not surprising that people take unpaid leaves from work to study for the exam. They stop socializing. They barely see their loved ones. Last month, in an interview with new master sommelier Roland Micu of Campbell's International Culinary Center, he told me that in those final months of study, he limited his breaks to eating, showering and going to the bathroom.

Apparently, two of the candidates in "Somm" take similarly drastic measures. They relocate to San Francisco and move into an apartment together, along with their wives, for the sole purpose of studying for the exam. They seek out mentors and join multiple wine-tasting groups to offset the costs of buying thousands of dollars worth of wine, including prized vintages from Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Add in exam fees, travel costs to sit for the exam, and appropriate attire for the service portion of the exam, and Wise says it's not unusual for a master sommelier candidate to drop $100,000 to $200,000 in the process.

"That's the cost of a pre-med college education," Wise says.

But, for what? Tacking "MS" to your name doesn't promise a six-figure salary or the key to a sommelier mansion where wine bunnies bathe you in Château d'Yquem. It does grant membership into the Court of Master Sommeliers, a strictly regulated and somewhat secretive society, which has never allowed cameras near its fourth and final examination. Until now, of course.

Wise says he set out to make a film about a mystifying process, not one that taught people about wine.

"There is a lot of romanticism put around wine that doesn't really fit, I think," he says. "Most wine films falls into two realms: They are so over the top that normal people find them pretentious or the movie is so dumbed down that they bore you. We wanted to make a funny, entertaining film that people would watch. And I guarantee that halfway through the movie, you're going to ask yourself when the hell it was ever just about wine."